Chapter 144: Harvest of Ashes and the Loyalty of Mud
The projection in the firmament faded, swallowed by the night sky and the dark clouds that once again covered the stars. However, Samael Morningstar's final command continued to resonate inside the skulls of everyone present, an echo of absolute authority that admitted no reply: "Class dismissed. Now, harvest."
The reverential silence that had fallen over the Purple Light Sect's Mountain Range during the dissection of the Great Saints was broken. But it was not shattered by tribal war cries, nor by cheers of victory, nor by the chaotic clash of steel. It was broken by the dull, rhythmic, and horrifying sound of systematic executions.
Vexia's lesson had changed something fundamental in the psyche of the Morningstar Legion. They had entered this mountain as warriors thirsty for glory, seeking to prove themselves against legends and gods. Now, after seeing the deities dismantled like simple, defective biological machines, the thousand disciples operated with an industrial coldness.
The disciples of the Purple Light Sect who were still breathing, those who had surrendered by throwing their weapons to the bloodstained ground, or those who had hidden trembling in craters, cellars, and ventilation shafts, were found one by one. The thermal and infrared sensors of Vexia's 30,000 Puppets swept the ruins with relentless precision, while the sharpened spiritual sense of the Morningstar youths tracked the heartbeats of the terrified.
There was no mercy. There were no grandiloquent speeches from villains savoring victory. No prisoners were taken.
There were simply silent flashes of steel under the moon and bodies falling to the ground. It was a surgical cleansing. A logistical extermination designed to ensure that not a single root remained from which the sect could sprout again.
In the destroyed North Courtyard, a labyrinth of fallen pillars and decapitated statues of founders, Cedric Morningstar (Sequence 4) walked, dragging his feet through the rubble. His condition was deplorable. Threads of dried blood still stained his pale face from his eyes, nose, and ears, evidence of the cerebral hemorrhage he nearly suffered while processing the Stage 6 Guardian's arrays. His clothes were charred, and his hands trembled with micro-spasms.
From among a pile of broken roof tiles, an Elder of the Purple Light Sect, with both legs shattered and his face bathed in tears of despair, suddenly emerged. In his hand, he held a High Earth-Grade Explosive Talisman, shining with an unstable red light.
"Die, demons! May heaven curse you!" screamed the elder, throwing the talisman straight at Cedric's face with the intention of mutual annihilation.
Cedric didn't even blink. His blue eyes, dull from exhaustion, showed no surprise. He didn't invoke his complex runic mandalas. He didn't raise his metal shield.
He simply raised his right hand, the skin of which was flayed and raw from touching molten tungsten hours earlier, and caught the talisman in mid-air.
With a sharp motion, Cedric clenched his fist. He crushed the talisman's array in the millisecond prior to detonation. He applied the [Rule of Supreme Metal] directly to the paper, transmuting the explosive core into inert lead. The small explosion was completely contained within his closed fist, emitting barely a muffled Poof! and a wisp of black smoke that escaped between his bleeding fingers.
"Inefficient," Cedric muttered, his voice lacking inflection.
He took two steps forward and stepped on the elder's chest. Crack. The ribcage gave way under the Emperor of Seals' reinforced boot, stopping the enemy's heart instantly.
Cedric turned toward a dozen gray puppets of the Dead Blood Legion marching behind him.
"Secure the perimeter of sector three," he ordered, coughing up a bit of blood that he wiped with the back of his hand. "Leave not a single rat alive. Check the foundations. If it breathes, turn it off."
While the mechanized infantry and regular disciples cleansed the surface with slaughterhouse efficiency, the elite Sequences headed underground. The treasures weren't in the burned temples; they were buried in the dark.
The Grand Vault of the Purple Light Sect, located a hundred meters below the Central Peak, was a fortress within a fortress. It was protected by a circular door of Thunder Alloy, five meters thick, engraved with complex Saint-Grade defensive runes that emitted electrical arcs warning of their lethality.
Kael, Eris, and Violeta stood before it in the underground tunnel.
The Sovereign of the Crimson Sword could barely stand. Every step he took was an act of pure willpower. Kael leaned heavily on Eris's shoulder. His left side, hastily bandaged, was a knot of burning pain, but the truly macabre sight was his right arm. The hilt of Fang, his immense heavy sword, had literally fused with the flesh, tendons, and bones of his hand due to the immeasurable temperature of the Flame of Purgatory and the Black Sun. The black sword and his arm were now a single grotesque entity, hanging by his side like a dead, charred weight.
"Do I break it?" Eris asked, twirling her black-flamed spear, eager to destroy the obstacle.
"Don't be a beast," Violeta said, taking a step forward with her usual elegance, tapping the imposing Thunder Alloy door with the tip of her slender rapier. "If you hit it with brute force, the resonance seals will detect the impact, and you might trigger the self-destruct protocol. They would burn all the treasures inside, and Samael would hang us by our thumbs. Leave it to me."
Violeta closed her eyes and exhaled a fine white mist. The air in the underground tunnel instantly dropped to -100 degrees Celsius.
[Touch of Absolute Zero].
She placed the palm of her left hand, delicate and pale, directly over the main runic lock. Black frost, a manifestation of her conceptual cold, spread rapidly from her fingers, climbing like shadowy vines over the glowing runes. The flow of electrical energy literally froze. The defensive runes, designed to resist fire and physical force, were not prepared for the cessation of atomic movement. The metal and magic became brittle like cheap glass from a blown wine goblet.
Violeta withdrew her hand and, with a casual motion, tapped her ice-covered index finger on the lock.
Clink!
The sound was sharp and musical. The immense Saint-Grade locking mechanism shattered into millions of shards of black ice. The colossal door, without its seals to support the tons of weight, yielded inward with a groan of tortured metal that echoed in the depths of the mountain.
They entered.
The Grand Vault was a spectacle designed to drive any mortal mad with greed. It was an immense cavern, illuminated by eternal light formations, filled with shelves of jade and spiritual wood that reached the ceiling thirty meters above.
There were literal mountains of High-Grade and Supreme-Grade Spiritual Stones, piled up like grains of wheat, shining with an intoxicating violet light. There were entire walls lined with crystal shelves containing thousands of Martial Arts Manuals of the millennial sect, ranging from Mortal Grade to secret Saint-Grade copies. There were symmetrical rows of divine armor, flying swords emitting faint hums, and white jade altars where thousand-year-old pills and medicinal herbs were displayed, perfectly preserved in spheres of spiritual amber.
"Jackpot..." whistled Eris, her eyes gleaming. She walked over to a mountain of treasures and picked up a handful of astral jewels that, on their own, would be worth enough to buy an entire city, inhabitants included, in the mortal world.
Kael didn't look at the jewels. He didn't look at the mountains of spiritual stones or the glowing relics. Guided by a deep, aching resonance, he slowly walked toward the back of the room, dragging his heavy feet.
His fused arm, the monstrosity that was now Magma Fang, began to vibrate faintly. His crimson dragon instinct, his affinity for heat and the forge, guided him through the immense cavern like a biological radar.
He stopped in front of a black wooden box, exceptionally simple, without engravings, without runic padlocks. It sat on a solitary pedestal in the darkest area of the vault. Kael lifted the lid with his left hand, his only useful one left.
Inside, resting on a time-worn velvet cushion, was an irregular metal ingot the size of a human forearm. It did not shine. It did not emit sacred light. In fact, it looked like a black hole absorbing the room's illumination. It had microscopic, dark red veins that pulsed rhythmically and faintly, as if the metal itself had a living circulatory system.
[Spiritual Metal: Void Blood Iron - High Saint Grade].
"This..." Kael murmured. He extended the fingers of his healthy hand and brushed the surface.
The metal was boiling to the touch, but it didn't burn his dragon skin. It responded to his thermal signature, syncing with the beats of his [Heart of Eternal Forge]. It was one of the rarest metals on the continent, capable of fusing biology and weaponry at an atomic level.
Kael gritted his teeth, feeling a stab of agonizing pain in his ruined right arm. But he also felt a promise.
"With this..." he whispered to himself, the vision of his recovery taking shape in his mathematical mind, "...with this I can unstick the steel from my flesh. I can reforge Fang. I can reforge my own arm."
Kael smiled. It was a predatory, savage smile that completely ignored the piercing pain of his shattered ribs. He stored the heavy black ingot in his Spatial Ring with utmost care. He knew the recovery would be a hell of pain and alchemy in Vexia's forges, but he was Sequence 1. He wouldn't remain crippled. He would be reborn stronger.
"Pack it all up!" Violeta ordered from the entrance, snapping her fingers at the dozens of bulky cargo puppets marching in behind them with immense spatial containers. "The Marshal ordered efficiency! Don't even leave the jade tiles on the floor! Scrape the walls down to the dust!"
On the surface, far from the legendary treasures, the Saint-Grade metals, and the big names of the Sequences, the reality of war was much dirtier, more brutal, and devoid of glamour.
Among the smoking ruins of what used to be the immense Outer Disciples' Quarters, the thick smoke and the smell of burned flesh, copper, and coagulated blood filled the night air, making it almost unbreathable.
A young disciple of the Morningstar Clan limped down a path flanked by destroyed dormitories. His gray infantry uniform was torn in dozens of places and soaked in a bright dark red, the overwhelming majority of which did not belong to him. He had an ugly, deep, bleeding cut across his left cheek, and his left arm hung by his side at a strange, unnatural angle, clearly dislocated.
But he didn't stop. He didn't groan. He didn't ask for a medic.
Dante Morningstar (17 years old - Body Refinement Realm Stage 7).
Dante was not a Sequence. He was not part of the elite fifty. He was not a genius born with a silver spoon and divine bloodlines awakened in the cradle. He was a foot soldier, one of the thousand, a cog in the immense machine. He was, until today, a nobody in the continent's hierarchy.
He stopped in front of the corpse of a Deacon of the Purple Light Sect (a cultivator of the Qi Sea Realm). The man, who in life had been a proud supervisor, lay face up with the immense gray spear of a Vexia puppet driven straight through his chest, anchoring him to the earth.
Any other Morningstar disciple, drunk on victory, would have kept walking, seeking the glory of decapitating a survivor or seeking access to the great halls.
Dante slowly knelt down, ignoring the sharp pain in his scraped knees.
With a cold, meticulous, and practiced efficiency, he searched the bloody pockets of the dead deacon. He didn't mind getting his hands stained with viscera. His fingers rummaged until they found a low-grade Spatial Ring and a small leather pouch that emitted the faint scent of healing herbs.
"Mine," Dante whispered. His voice was hoarse, raspy, as if he had been swallowing smoke and dust for fifty straight days without water.
Dante wiped the ring on his own tunic and threaded it onto a makeshift necklace made of a thick leather cord he wore around his neck. On that cord, hidden beneath his shirt fabric, already hung twelve other spatial rings, stained with blood and mud, trophies from the officers he had looted in the heat of battle.
He stood up and looked around. He saw other Morningstar disciples, groups of youths his own age, celebrating loudly, laughing, comparing how many merit points they had earned in the slaughter. Some toasted with water from their canteens; others healed their friends with glowing pills.
Dante didn't laugh. He didn't celebrate.
His eyes, a dark and calculating gray, scanned the burning ruins looking for more bodies, more hidden corners, more opportunities. He wasn't looking for immediate recognition. He was looking for resources. Growth.
Dante knew exactly what his place in the universe was. He knew the golden rule of the Morningstar Legion: No brother spills the blood of another brother. The family was sacred. Loyalty to Patriarch Samael was the only true creed. Dante would give his life without blinking if the war demanded it. He respected the Sequences deeply, for they had fought against the Stage 6 and Stage 8 saints so the army could survive.
For that very reason, Dante would never approach the Grand Vault. Not because he feared the Sequences would kill him out of greed—such a thing was impossible in the clan—but because he understood the natural order. The Sequences had earned the celestial loot through baths of divine blood. Dante hadn't killed a Saint. Therefore, he had no right to the Saints' treasures.
Not yet.
He knew that, in this clan, if you didn't have a divine bloodline awakened by heaven's grace, you had to build your own staircase to the top using the bones of your fallen enemies. And Dante was willing to pile up a thousand bones if necessary. Every looted ring, every minor pill, every low-grade spiritual stone, was another brick in his personal construction.
He approached an intact stone wall. He placed the palm of his right hand flat against it, took a deep breath, and with a muffled, dull grunt of repressed pain, violently shoved his body against the rock.
Crunch!
Dante's dislocated shoulder popped back into place. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead, but he barely blinked. He rotated his left arm slowly, making sure the joint worked, even though the pain was piercing.
"This is only the beginning," he muttered to himself.
Dante looked up at the firmament, ignoring the black smoke rising around him. His gray eyes locked onto the immense silhouette of the Morningstar Citadel, the floating fortress of the Sovereign.
He didn't look at it with blind adoration or religious fanaticism. He looked at it with hunger. A dark, deep, and ambitious loyalty. He knew the Patriarch saw everything, and Dante swore to himself that, someday, he wouldn't be walking among the rubble looting dead deacons. Someday, his name would echo in the halls of that Citadel. He would be the darkest and deadliest soldier Samael could desire.
An hour later, the looting had concluded with a logistical efficiency that would have made the Grand Marshal proud.
The immense underground Treasury was cleaner than the day it was built; not a single copper coin remained. The secret cultivation manuals, the millennial techniques, and the sect's historical records were safely packed and in Vexia's hands to be digitized into the Citadel's database. Every hostile survivor had been eliminated without hesitation.
On the surface of the Purple Light Mountain Range, only the dead remained.
Eighty thousand corpses covered the foothills, valleys, and peaks of the mountain. Elders, deacons, disciples, slaughtered spiritual mount beasts. A literal ocean of biomass, dead flesh, broken armor, and latent energy wasted on the ground. An open-air graveyard.
From the highest balcony of the Morningstar Citadel's observation tower, Samael stepped outside. His heavy black monarch's cloak billowed violently in the freezing winds of the stratosphere. Beside him, Empress Seraphina accompanied him in silence, her body still recovering from the crystallization of her meridians.
Samael looked down at the massacre he had orchestrated. His face was inscrutable.
"In this universe, waste is the greatest of sins," Samael said, his deep voice resonating in the tranquility of the heights. "We leave nothing behind."
Samael took a step toward the edge and extended his right hand, palm open toward the immensity of the mountain.
Space itself around the entire Citadel distorted. Millions of dark violet runes, intertwined with chains of black light, appeared in the empty air, rapidly expanding to form a colossal magic circle three kilometers in diameter that covered the night sky like a demonic halo.
[Law of the Void: The Great Harvest of the Abyss].
Down in the ruins, the wind suddenly changed direction, blowing upwards.
To Dante, who stood in the ruins, and to the disciples lining up to board the transport ships, the spectacle that followed was a vision from a biblical nightmare, a demonstration of their god's absolute power.
Suddenly, gravity inverted, but exclusively and selectively for the dead.
A corpse a few meters from Dante slowly rose from the ground, as if an invisible thread were pulling it. Then it was ten. Then a thousand. Eighty thousand bodies—men, women, elders, and massive beasts—began to float. They rose toward the dark sky, spinning slowly, forming a macabre vortex, a hurricane of dead flesh and dented armor, drawn inexorably toward the Sovereign's immense black runic circle.
There was no rain of blood falling on the living. Samael's Law of the Void hermetically sealed the fluids and residual energy inside the bodies, ensuring not a single drop of essence was spilled.
The corpses crossed the clouds and entered the black circle, instantly disappearing from the continent's physical reality.
They were teleported directly into the mechanical bowels of the Morningstar Citadel. There, in the vast Underground Recycling Chambers, Grand Marshal Vexia awaited them. The gigantic runic shredders roared to life with an industrial grind. The biomass was processed; the weapon metals melted down; and the raw spiritual energy was channeled as direct fertilizer to the massive glowing roots of the Stellar World Tree, which pulsed with a deep green light upon receiving its macabre continental compost.
In less than five minutes, the mountain range was completely stripped clean.
There were no bodies in the streets. There were no swords stuck in the earth. Only broken buildings, collapsed temples, dried bloodstains on the stone, and a deep, absolute silence remained.
Samael had wiped the Purple Light Sect from the face of the earth with fire and steel, and then, in an act of supreme pragmatism, he had taken even their physical remains to feed his own family's growth.
Samael lowered his hand. The void runes dissipated.
"Let's go," the Monarch ordered, turning around and heading back to the throne room.
The Citadel's immense [Mantle of the Void] activated once again. The colossal obsidian fortress, which had darkened the southern sky during the long night, began to visually fade. First, it became translucent, then transparent, blending with the clouds, and finally, it became completely invisible to the eye and spiritual sense.
A dull, silent, and massive shockwave emanated from the stratosphere as the immense gravitational drive engines engaged in unison. The Citadel shot toward the horizon, crossing hundreds of kilometers in seconds, leaving behind the empty and dead Purple Light Mountain Range.
Below, the cold wind blew through the ghostly, empty ruins.
A solitary crow, with black plumage and bright eyes, landed on what used to be the Grand Elder's great jade throne atop the Central Peak. The bird tilted its head and cawed once, looking for food, flesh, something among the stones. But it found nothing. It hopped and took flight again toward the distant forest.
The Morningstar Clan had not even left crumbs.
Several thousand kilometers away, beyond the minor mountain ranges, in the gold-bathed capital of the Red Star city, one of the true powers of the southern continent.
In the Imperial Palace's stellar monitoring room, a low-ranking supervisor dressed in gold-embroidered silk robes sipped from a cup of hot spiritual tea. He stared out of boredom at an immense three-dimensional crystal map displaying the power nodes and formations of the minor factions in the frontier provinces.
Suddenly, a small purple light on the edge of the map blinked twice, emitted a faint static sound, and went out completely.
The supervisor frowned. He set down his tea, approached the crystal, and touched the darkened area. He confirmed the coordinates. It wasn't a sensor error. The Purple Light Sect's array signature had disappeared.
He turned to a general who was dozing in a nearby armchair.
"Sir. Apologies for the disturbance. The Purple Light Sect's main array has just gone offline. It seems they have been eradicated."
The general opened one eye lazily, letting out a yawn that revealed sharp teeth.
"The Purple Light Sect? Those old hermits who thought they owned their little mountain of trash?"
"Yes, sir."
The general shrugged, closing his eye again and settling back into the armchair.
"They probably stepped into some ancient beast's territory, or some minor mountain faction got tired of their taxes and poisoned them. They were an obsolete relic. An old, weak faction clinging to the past. No one in the Empire cares about a piece of dead rock. Erase their dot from the map and get back to your business, boy."
"As you command, general."
The supervisor pressed a rune on the crystal, permanently erasing the name of the Purple Light Sect from imperial records, and returned to his hot tea, completely ignorant that, in the darkness of the southern clouds, an obsidian leviathan was advancing, devouring the world, step by step, in absolute silence.